It seems the Ebay’s (NASDAQ: EBAY) Paypal unit wants to hit all of the ‘Depots’ in the U.S. before branching out into the rest of the retail sector. Along with Home Depot (NYSE:HD) Office Depot (NYSE: ODP) is now testing PayPal’s in-store payment services in a few stores. 51 Home Depots are currently testing the service a well.
A report from Reuters confirms that this is true.
“It’s at this point in a small number of stores … because there are still some rough spots in that experience. There are some limitations on who can use it, service carriers that support that,” said Kevin Peters, president of Office Depot’s North American unit.
PayPal is testing their ‘wallet in the cloud’ system that lets them use their PayPal account as the means of payment simply by typing their mobile phone number and PIN into a device at the checkout counter. Moreover, the system will allow the customer to direct the payment to whatever source they choose up to 30 days after the transaction took place.
Home Depot is interested in the idea to improve the speed through which customers check out. Their spokesman believes that PayPal’s system has the chance to improve not only throughput but security and customer service at much lower transaction costs.
Office Depot, at this point, sounds much more circumspect, deciding to move more slowly with their testing.
This service is a direct shot at the two credit card giants, Visa and MasterCard.
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